She grew up on a farm in Fairmont, W.Va., raising Simmental cattle and competes in national livestock contests in places as far as Montana and Texas.

“I am called Farmer Brown a lot,” she says. “(Competing has) just has opened up so many doors and given me so many new connections and I guess just a bigger outlook on where agriculture is going and what the industry has to offer for the people in it. In West Virginia, there are not many people that do what I do with cattle especially on the scale that I do. Opening up to that, and seeing different parts of the country and how it’s different in other areas and how people make it work to fit where they’re at and what they have. It’s really inspired me to keep going in that, there’s so much future in that and how important that role is.”

Coincidentally, Brown learned about Marietta College through friends in nearby Fleming, Ohio, who are also in the cattle industry. After visiting campus and participating in the Pioneer Scholars competition, Brown quickly realized she found her college.

“When I had narrowed it down to two, it was Marietta and West Virginia Wesleyan,” she says. “Marietta just seems to have a lot more outside the academics as far as connecting to the students more. There’s more to do and more opportunities outside of the classroom too, so I think that was my deciding factor for Marietta.”

“I was on my way to tennis regionals with a car full of girls and I think I started yelling on the phone when they called me and of course the whole tennis team knew right away,” she says. “It was the day before our prom, which was the same day as our tennis regionals, so some of the girls were going to get prom shoes. We did that, and I talked on the phone the whole time calling different people and what not, then went and played tennis.”

The best call was to her parents, Chris and Kellee.

“They might have been more relieved than me. They were excited,” Brown says. “My mom cried when I called her; my dad was excited too. They were very happy.”

“Mollee rose to the top of a very deep scholarship pool that included students from 43 states,” Turley says. “Mollee’s outstanding success in the classroom and her performance at the scholarship competition made her a perfect fit for the John G. and Jeanne B. McCoy Scholarship.”

Endowed by alumnus John G. ’35 and Jeanne B McCoy in 1998, the McCoy Scholarship Program promotes and recognizes outstanding academic ability and achievement by an incoming freshman student. As long as the student maintains a strong academic performance, the scholarship is renewed each year.

Brown is majoring in Biology, but she’s still not sure what job she will have in the future, but she knows what the field will be.

“I am definitely going to have a job in agriculture and something relating agriculture. I‘m really interested in helping to make the merge between the growing population and combining food needs for that. Especially when you have a population that’s growing out of cities and taking from the resources. … And then compensating not only for the land you’re losing but also for more people. That’s what I’m looking into the future and what I’m really passionate about impacting.”